Zohreh Bakhshi

Lives and works in Houston, TX

Artist statement

My work explores what it means to live physically in one place while remaining emotionally connected to another. Since moving from Iran to the United States, I have been thinking about home not only as a physical location, but as something carried through memory, images, patterns, objects, and repeated gestures. Persian rugs, domestic interiors, windows, family photographs, sleeping bodies, and handmade objects appear throughout my work as carriers of memory, belonging, and emotional connection. My practice moves between painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, textile, and wood. Photography is often my starting point. I work with family photographs and images I took inside and around my parents’ home in Iran. Through silkscreen, image transfer, collage, repetition, and painting, these photographs move onto fabric and wooden surfaces. During the transfer process, parts of an image may fade, shift, overlap, or disappear. I value these imperfections because memory also changes over time. I am not trying to recreate home exactly as it was, but to reconstruct how it is remembered across distance. Persian rugs are especially important in my work. They are connected to childhood, family, and domestic life rather than functioning only as decorative patterns. In Carried Home, I transferred the image of a rug from my former home in Iran onto fabric. The original rug was too large and heavy to bring to the United States, so its printed image became another way of carrying it...

Artwork